Music Tunes & Tales

Music Tunes & Tales A live concert to me is exciting because of all the electricity that is generated in the crowd and on stage.

It’s my favorite part of the business - live concerts

Baker Knight wrote "The Wonder of You," and Ray Peterson had the original hit with it back in 1959. Elvis recorded his v...
09/01/2026

Baker Knight wrote "The Wonder of You," and Ray Peterson had the original hit with it back in 1959. Elvis recorded his version live at the International Hotel in Las Vegas on February 19, 1970, and it topped the UK chart for six weeks straight, over 400,000 copies sold there. In the US it only reached No. 9. That gap is striking, a live recording, no studio polish, performing better in an entire country than it did in Elvis's own home market. British audiences apparently wanted the raw concert version more than radio programmers back home did.

💖 The song in the comment👇

🎵 Judy - Elvis Presley (1961, released 1967)Written and originally recorded by Teddy Redell in 1960, Elvis cut his own v...
09/01/2026

🎵 Judy - Elvis Presley (1961, released 1967)
Written and originally recorded by Teddy Redell in 1960, Elvis cut his own version March 13, 1961 at RCA Studio B, backed by Hank Garland, Scotty Moore, and pianist Floyd Cramer. It sat as an album track on "Something for Everybody" for six years before RCA finally released it as a single in 1967 - paired as the B-side to "There's Always Me," another song recorded that same session. Fans have long assumed the song was written about actress Judy Tyler, Elvis's co-star in "Jailhouse Rock," but it wasn't - Teddy Redell wrote it with no connection to her at all.
🎵 Elvis Presley - Judy💖 The song in the comment👇

📞 Just Tell Her Jim Said Hello - Elvis Presley (1962)Written by the legendary Leiber and Stoller, this was tucked away a...
08/31/2026

📞 Just Tell Her Jim Said Hello - Elvis Presley (1962)
Written by the legendary Leiber and Stoller, this was tucked away as the B-side to "She's Not You," recorded March 19, 1962 at RCA Studio B during the same session as its A-side and "Suspicion." Songwriters spun an answer version soon after, "Just Tell Him Jane Said Hello," flipping the gender to reply from the other side. Despite the pedigree, it stayed a genuinely overlooked B-side - fans still debate it as one of the era's forgotten Elvis gems that never gets talked about alongside his bigger hits.
🎵 Elvis Presley - Just Tell Her Jim Said Hello💖 The song in the comment👇

Charlie Rich wrote "I'm Coming Home," and Elvis cut it March 12, 1961, at RCA Studio B, years before Rich became a star ...
08/31/2026

Charlie Rich wrote "I'm Coming Home," and Elvis cut it March 12, 1961, at RCA Studio B, years before Rich became a star in his own right with "Behind Closed Doors." Scotty Moore and Hank Garland on guitars, Floyd Cramer on piano, the same core session players who'd backed Elvis through most of that Nashville era. "Something for Everybody" went to #1 on the pop albums chart when it came out that May. A songwriter who hadn't broken through yet supplying a track for the biggest star in music says something about how Nashville's writing pool actually worked back then.

💖 The song in the comment👇

By June 21, 1977, when Elvis sang "My Way" in Rapid City, South Dakota, he needed a lyric sheet to get through a song he...
08/30/2026

By June 21, 1977, when Elvis sang "My Way" in Rapid City, South Dakota, he needed a lyric sheet to get through a song he'd been performing since 1971. That performance became the one everyone remembers, filmed for the CBS special "Elvis in Concert." He died less than two months later, on August 16, and RCA released the recording as a single on October 3, 1977, timing that turned an old standard into what fans took as his own goodbye. He'd never put "My Way" out as a single while he was alive. 🎤 Sometimes a farewell only becomes one in hindsight.
💖 The song in the comment👇

"I Don't Know a Thing About Love (The Moon Song)" was Conway Twitty's 48th number-one country hit. Forty-eighth. Harlan ...
08/30/2026

"I Don't Know a Thing About Love (The Moon Song)" was Conway Twitty's 48th number-one country hit. Forty-eighth. Harlan Howard wrote it, and Twitty's own daughter, Joni Lee, sang backing vocals on the track. It only held the top spot for one week in 1984, but it stuck around the chart for 14 weeks total. Willie Nelson liked the song enough to make it the title track of his own Harlan Howard tribute album, nearly forty years later, in 2023. 🌙 Forty-eight number ones and Twitty still sounds like he's got something to prove.
🎶 ❤️ The song is in the comment 👇

🍀 Good Luck Charm - Elvis Presley (1962)Written by Aaron Schroeder, who'd already given Elvis a run of hits like "It's N...
08/30/2026

🍀 Good Luck Charm - Elvis Presley (1962)
Written by Aaron Schroeder, who'd already given Elvis a run of hits like "It's Now or Never" and "I Got Stung," this became a #1 in both the US and UK - but it also marked the end of that partnership. Colonel Parker's standing rule was that songwriters had to sign over publishing rights to Elvis's own company to get a cut recorded, and Schroeder finally refused after this one. The dispute even landed in court, and Schroeder never wrote for Elvis again - part of a wider pattern that pushed away other longtime hitmakers like Leiber and Stoller, and left Elvis leaning on weaker soundtrack songs through much of the rest of the decade.
🎵 Elvis Presley - Good Luck Charm💖 The song in the comment👇

🌙 If You Talk in Your Sleep - Elvis Presley (1974)Written by Red West and Johnny Christopher - the same duo who'd later ...
08/29/2026

🌙 If You Talk in Your Sleep - Elvis Presley (1974)
Written by Red West and Johnny Christopher - the same duo who'd later write "Always on My Mind" - this funky, unusually risqué track deals with an affair and the fear of sleep-talk confessions giving it away. Recorded at Stax Studios in Memphis in December 1973, RCA oddly paired it as a double A-side with "Help Me," a gospel plea for guidance - one reviewer joked it made for a strange pairing, a song about adultery on the flip side of a prayer for forgiveness. It reached #17 pop, a real hit despite Elvis being largely off radio's radar by that point.
🎵 Elvis Presley - If You Talk in Your Sleep💖 The song in the comment👇

Otis Blackwell wrote four of Elvis's biggest hits, including "Don't Be Cruel," "All Shook Up," and this one, and never o...
08/29/2026

Otis Blackwell wrote four of Elvis's biggest hits, including "Don't Be Cruel," "All Shook Up," and this one, and never once met him in person. Blackwell reportedly had a superstition about being around movie stars, so he turned down the chance to appear in Girls! Girls! Girls!, the very film this song was written for. The song hit #1 in the UK and became that year's Christmas chart-topper there, but in the US it stalled at #2, kept off the top by The Four Seasons' "Big Girls Don't Cry."
💖 The song in the comment👇

🎤 Yesterday - Elvis Presley (live, 1969)McCartney wrote this alone, one of the most covered songs ever, and Elvis picked...
08/29/2026

🎤 Yesterday - Elvis Presley (live, 1969)
McCartney wrote this alone, one of the most covered songs ever, and Elvis picked it up for his August 1969 Las Vegas shows, often folding it into a medley with "Hey Jude." He later recorded it for the live album "On Stage: February, 1970," introducing it simply as "my version of..." In one live rendition, Elvis subtly changed a lyric - singing "I did something wrong" instead of McCartney's original "I said something wrong" - a small shift McCartney noticed and later joked, decades on, that Elvis and several other male singers seemed to be softening their own culpability in the line.
🎵 Elvis Presley - Yesterday💖 The song in the comment👇

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